September 20, 2010: another day at school

September 20, 2010: Tomorrow I'll be showing the JPL video for all the 9B students so when I met with the 9B intermediate students today, I decided to tell them a little about the movie they would be seeing. We went over the planets and I told them a bit about Pathfinder, MER, MSL, Galileo, and Juno. The boys had some very good questions to ask and I could see they'll get a lot from the movie. We'll see.

I also substitute taught the 10E boys, and as I feared, the 10E students are non bilingual students meaning their English skills are weak compared to the English of the rest of the 10^th grade students. I started discussing blind dating by doing what the book suggested for classroom activities. The first activity suggested taking a poll asking them whether they think blind dating is a good idea or a bad one. Of course, many (i.e., most) of the boys had no opinion. For those that did, I asked for reasons for their answers and they could come up with none. Strike Activity 1 from my list of things to do. On to Activity 2: "Suppose a friend of yours went on a blind date. What questions would you ask him/her using the words 'Who', 'What', 'Where', 'Why', 'When', and 'How' to begin your questions". This seemed to get more responses. I pushed and finally produced a list of questions that I wrote on the board. Then I told the boys to write answers to these questions as if they had been on the blind date. Then I had each boy read a question of another student and he would answer it. That's the best I could do with this group of boys. It just seemed they were not into English or school in general.

Other than that, my day was ordinary. I did go to the bank with Kati to get some money and I also bought more minutes for my phone. Pretty slick way to do it. There are stores all over where you can buy more minutes and you get a text message informing you that the minutes have been purchased. Now I know what to do to buy more minutes when I need them.